1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an automatic performing apparatus of an electronic musical instrument which reads out performance information stored on an appropriate recording medium and generates tone signals according to the performance information.
2. Description of the Prior Art
An automatic performing apparatus of this type is provided with a memory to store performance information read out from the recording medium. The memory successively stores musical note data including pitch data and duration data with progression of a melody. Note data are successively read out of the memory at time intervals corresponding to note durations, and musical tone signals having pitches corresponding to the pitch data read out are formed. Such an automatic performing apparatus may be provided with an auto rhythm playing device, and the note duration is measured by a tempo clock signal used for rhythm generation. An example of such apparatus is disclosed in our copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 217,896 filed on Dec. 18, 1980 and assigned to the same assignee with the present application. Such a prior automatic performing apparatus is designed only for automatically generating a musical tone signal corresponding to each melody note. It is desirable, however, that tone colors of generated tone signals and/or modulation effects such as vibrato or tremolo, that is, generation modes of tone signals, can be set automatically. It is also desirable that rhythm patterns, start control, tempo control in an automatic rhythm performance be selected automatically.
A performance by the automatic performing apparatus is naturally used as an exemplary one for a novice player. Therefore, from this aspect too, the generation mode of the automatically performed musical tones is desirable to be set automatically so that the generation mode of musical tones is also exemplary.